For six days following the horrifying murder of a young Loyola University Chicago student, the Big Four News Apps completely ignored the tragedy, even as the main suspect was identified as an illegal alien.
The victim, 18-year-old Sheridan Gorman, was walking in Chicago’s Tobey Prinz Beach Park on March 19 when a masked man, believed to be a Venezuelan national, Jose Medina-Medina, approached and fatally shot her as she tried to flee. Despite coverage from dozens of outlets across the political spectrum, Apple News, Google News, Microsoft’s MSN and Yahoo News did not promote a single article about Gorman in the top 20 of their morning editions between March 20 and 25. The apps did have 29 articles about other deaths or murders, however.
The omission is especially striking since all the Big Four News Apps promoted stories portraying immigration enforcement in a negative light during that same six-day period.
For example, on March 20, Apple News promoted an article from British outlet The Guardian deceptively titled, “Teenager becomes youngest person to die in ICE detention in Trump’s second term.”
The Guardian’s piece did not acknowledge until several paragraphs in that the detainee, Royer Perez-Jimenez, was believed to have committed suicide. Yet Apple News did not promote any articles about Gorman, who was even younger than Perez-Jimenez and died through no fault of her own.
Apple News also pushed a ProPublica piece on March 24 that highlighted ICE arrests of illegal aliens who have citizen children. Google News similarly promoted a sympathetic New York Times story on March 25 about a “mother and daughter” arrested by immigration officers at San Francisco International Airport. The two individuals had final deportation orders since 2019.
On March 23, Google News linked to a Daily Beast article claiming ICE was “blindsided” and “scrambling” after the Trump administration deployed agents to airports. Yahoo News joined in with a piece criticizing the use of ICE to assist overworked TSA employees.
The digital gatekeepers not only covered other stories related to illegal immigration but also other deadly events.
The news apps even linked to articles on murder, but not Gorman’s. On March 22, Yahoo News promoted an article on a murder, but one that occurred in 2013. Two days earlier, Yahoo News had promoted CNN coverage of how American student and Chicago native James Gracey was found dead this month in Barcelona. Google News also highlighted CNN’s report about Gracey on the same day, and linked to several other outlets’ reports on the young man’s death also.
Then, on March 24, Google News linked to an NPR article about a Colombian military plane crash that killed dozens, and a New York Times report on the Air Canada crash that resulted in the deaths of the pilot and copilot at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport.
Yahoo News made NBC News’s coverage of the LaGuardia crash its top article on March 23. That same day, MSN pushed a CNN article about reporter Jessi Pierce and her children, who were found dead after a house fire. Also on March 23, Apple News included an NBC News roundup of what it called the “biggest news” over the weekend, which did not mention Gorman once.
Methodology: During the time period March 20 - 25, 2026, MRC researchers examined the top 20 stories featured on the Big Four News Apps (Apple News, Google News, Microsoft’s MSN and Yahoo News) each day at approximately 8:30 AM ET. MRC researchers used the AllSides media bias ratings, which categorize an outlet as “left,” “lean left,” “center,” “lean right” or “right” to determine the overall bias presented by the Big Four News Apps and analyzed the results.
